Underground Zealot - If Life takes your Lemons
by geistklempner
Summary: God visited the Earth with yet another plague, dessicating part of California. What's the proper California attitude to keep? An interlude between "Soon" and "Silenced", from Underground Zealot, the sci-fi books by the authors of Left Behind. Published here because UZ is not a category.


Interlude between "Soon" and "Silenced"

"Hello! Lope Spatula? Mr. Lope Spatula, correct? Thanks for coming."

The figure that had walked up to Lope was a sharp contrast to his rugged, mature good looks - short, a little pudgy, pale, beardless and clearly unused to the South California sun.

"Mr... Biollo?"

"That's me! I prefer Mx. Biollo, I don't really do the whole gender thing. But anyway."

Lope retracted his hand almost immediately after that comment - the shake had seemed limp and damp to him, even though Biollo's hand had reached through the desiccation limit and was therefore completely dry.

In this neighborhood, the boundary of the desiccation zone had been determined with great precision about a week before, by a small group of tank-like survey drones, clearly adapted for the purpose, that marked down the exact spot using old fashioned litmus paper and large bottles of moisturizing spray. Then, two larger autonomous vehicle came, these clearly derived from forklift, to determine the curvature of the zone, if any. Finally, humans showed up - police and road worker set up plastic roadblocks and warning signs. A few of the believers threw rocks, others chanted hymns and urged the workers to repent, all to little reaction. The warning signs showed a handsomely detailed map of Los Angeles with a glowing dome covering the desiccation area.

At first, there was some worry that the government of Pacifica was going to build an actual dome, but it soon became apparent that the desiccation area had only been surveyed for the benefit of travelers and autonomous navigation systems - while within a day it was clearly marked on all online maps, actual construction equipment seemed to only focus near one of the westbound drainage canals. Larger construction drones arrived, with pipes, concrete, massive printing gantries - and curiously, police and NPO were either not present or present covertly among the few human workers.

A sort of metal sled was built to hug the drainage canal; then a big, featureless box of a building was printed on top of it, just outside of the desiccation zone. All the while, interactions between believers and workers had been minimal; ranging from a scuffle to a couple of games of checkers.

Eventually, a copter-tank drone powered by dry cells crossed through the desiccation zones, flew in for a few blocks, switched to land movement, trundled forward to an intersection and started notifying that Kian Biollo, site engineer, wanted a meeting with a "local refugee leader". The machine, visibly a hand-made one-off, deployed a small solar apron and spent a few days repeating its message every time a warm body approached it. Once an internal counter reached enough people, the robot declared it components "a gift for the refugees" and shut itself off.

Two days later, Lope Spatula was meeting this Kian Biollo, site engineer, and finding himself underwhelmed by the first impression.

"I've come with a business proposal! Tomorrow, we're going to activate the first production desiccation turbine assembly. Would any of your, uh, citizens be interested in working with us on the ancillaries of it?"

"You mean that big barge thing?"

"Correct. You've probably seen the pipeline we've drawn through the drainage canal. That leads straight to the ocean, of course."

"All the water in the ocean is nothing compared to God's word! If you plan to flood us out, we will laugh at you as your machine pumps out nothing."

"Why would we do that? Whatever property issues arise from your occupation of what used to be prime real estate are... Well, talk to Legal, I'm Operations. Anyway, we are rather counting on the fact that the sea water will disappear."

"... what?"

"You see, the big barge thing is in fact a collection of turbines that exhaust into a small reservoir. As we speak, the big barge thing is being moved, on jacks, so that the end of this reservoir sits within the desiccation zone; tomorrow, the turbines will be externally powered to draw water in from the Pacific Ocean and dump into the reservoir. There, the water will disappear, creating negative pressure and a siphon effect; external power will be disconnected, the negative pressure from the disappeared water will draw in more, and the water flow will continue. Again, exactly like a siphon. After priming, the turbines will be able to generate an immense amount of perfectly clean energy, all thanks to your... curse."

"... what?"

"Would you like to see a diagram?" Biollo opened a briefcase and pulled out a ruggedized old-style laptop.

"... No, I think I understand the principle, just..."

"And that's not all! As we map the exclusion zone, all sort of chemical manufacturers are moving in at its boundary. In theory, the desiccation zone allows for all sort of interesting chemical processes! Big real estate rush right now actually, on paper right now, we're sort of one of the first at the scene, but... Well, I'd get that property dispute in order if I were you, Pacifica has pretty friendly squatting-rights laws. Again, Legal from our consortium wants to help you cash in!" Biollo felt insincere putting it that way - the folks in Legal were about as helpful as a pack of hyenas - but didn't mind sticking to the script. Lope kept scowling on.

"... And that's not to mention electrolysis! That's my field, you see, electrochemistry, we're finding out all sort of interesting things-"

Lope held a hand up and stopped Biollo's prattling. "I'm sure all this technical stuff is interesting to you, but what do I care?"

"Ah, yes." Biollo put the laptop aside and handed Lope a very thin tablet showing a very thick legal document. "Our consortium is uneasy about sending personnel into the dessication zone, and since your group seems to be immune and there are a few things that automated systems can't quite do yet, we would like to hire you on as maintenance workers. Specifically, we're going to need some human hands in place to avoid soil contamination; the salt we extract from the sea has already found a buyer, but it's important to keep an eye on-"

"It doesn't matter." Lope's deep voice was a pleasant contrast to Biollo's androgynous, nasal tone.

"... Uh... Could you folks at least... I don't know, vote, pray about it, or whatever it is that you people do?"

"We will. I mean, none of your bustling about matters in the end - God is still sovereign; you're best off looking into repentance instead."

"Rep- Oh, yes, sure... My minor in university was in comparative religions, did you know that? Back when you needed a security clearance to take it. Er... Would it help if I came to church with you?"

"It would probably help you greatly, yes." Lope, of course, doubted Biollo's sincerity, but there was no reason to not take the opportunity. "Whatever you build here, in the end, it will be God's presence or the lake of fire."

To Lope's surprise, the engineer smiled broadly.

"Lake of fire? Ah, yes, excellent!"

Biollo actually had a simulation prepared for this - suspecting the issue would come up in talks, and because the person hours and machine time to be thrown at it were trivial, the software folk at the Consortium had run some simulations on that one.

The old ruggedized laptop loaded a presentation in front of the puzzled believer. "Sorry for the 2D" Biollo started "but, you know, high brightness screen and all that. So, we've got a lake of fire..."

A cartoon rendering of Hell, including a human and a demon symbolized by a small, light brown frowny face and a slightly larger, red frowny face, floating in the flames.

"... let's even say that its all true, for the sake of argument. Lake means that it has shores..."

The little human is shown swimming towards shore, slowly at first, then with decisiveness, and smiling for a moment upon reaching it. Then, with hesitation shown by the animation shaking, the little human dives back in, and helps the little demon reach the shore as well.

"...and fire means quite a few things - fuel, an atmosphere with oxyen, a recognizable chemistry..."

The human and demon are zoomed in, each figure shown representing a group. The two groups start digging into the walls of the lake. Some humans split off, cluster around the fiery waterline, and after a few seconds come up with a stylized contraption to redirect fire, which they then proceed to use to dig much faster than the other figures.

"... add no worries about safety, or the workforce aging out..."

A little demon face is run over by what looks like a crude steamroller; humans and other demons help it up, and it gives the OK sign.

"... and no real time limit..."

The animation speeds up; the little figures build a town, then a holding tank, then make water by chemical reactions - shown to succeed after a number of attempts, including one ending in a cartoony explosion that scatters many little faces back into the fire, and subsequent rescue operation - and are finally shown playing a soccer game on a green field, the two teams composed of humans and demons alike, wearing different "shirts" on the bottom half of their little faces.

"... we could turn Hell into quite the nice place to live very quickly."

In a nod to corporate, the presentation finishes with a number of statistics and snapshots of various reclamation projects after the Religion War. Biollo smiled at the astonished believer.

"... any questions?"

The believer stared. What to say? That this jovial person in front of him was wrong, and should repent? That it's not how it works? But here Mx. Biollo was, a bit sweaty in the California sun, having turned God's curse into a business opportunity and offering what should've been an enemy a share of the profit. Biollo took a step aside, and the sweat disappeared, but the encouraging smile only got a little wider.

"Who ARE you?"

"Oh, I'm nobody special, just a civil engineer. If you mean who are we? We're the people who keep your lights on, Mr. Spatula. We're the people who keep the phones talking. We're the people who built all this" Biollo pointed at the artificial landscape of downtown LA "and you are the people who are parasitizing it. So let's put a stop to that. Let's work out a symbiosis instead."

Wordlessly and with a slight yank, Lope took the tablet with the contract offer on it and turned around to get back to the church. A few moments later, Biollo stopped holding out the hand, turned the denied handshake into a wave, and headed back to the installation, whistling.


End file.
